NEWS: Myanmar Persecution

Discrimination. Abuse. Persecution. Most of us face these issues some way or another in our lives, some more than others. Those considered “privileged” are ones who are lucky enough to never experience what it’s like to be prejudiced because of race, religion or gender. One group, in particular, have been suffering silently for decades, and their pleas have only been acknowledged when the Myanmar army came into their community forcefully, killing, torturing and raping hundreds of thousands of innocent people. According to the Medium in December 2017, over 6,700 Rohingya were killed in Myanmar in one month. The testimonies described a living hell. At least 9,000 members of the ethnic Rohingya minority died between August 25 and September 24 and of the reported deaths, 71.7 percent were caused by violence. BBC adds on January 2018 that Myanmar’s leader Suu Kyi claims that reports of Rohingya violence are fake and that there is no crisis except for the religious stumbles. Calling this a “religious stumble” implies that there are two groups who simply have small conflicts with each other but doesn’t affect their way of life. Suu Kyi quickly glosses over the physical abuse the Rohingya have suffered with for the last two years and tolerated emotional violence for centuries before. Myanmar in the past was not considered a violent country, and was known as a nation which primarily focused on their own countries issues, neglecting foreign affairs. The Myanmar government took this ideology and used it as a personal advantage, claiming that if they were “so peaceful in the past, how could they ever do something so sickening to a large group of people?” However, the government conveniently forgets to acknowledge the evidence given by dozens of humanitarian groups of the violence that diminishes the truth in their vague claims. This forces us to ask, how many of our public officials lie? How many abuses and pleas have been stuffed because we’ve been told by our authorities that there’s nothing to worry about? How many people disregard hee Rohingya abuses because they’ve been told by their primary group of support that nothing is happening? Nearly all of Myanmar citizens are Buddhists, and because the Rohingya are a mix of Muslims and Hindus, they are considered ethnically impure and Myanmar denies them citizenship, claiming that they are illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even though the Rohingya can trace their roots to Myanmar for centuries. Because of this, the Rohingya remained the largest stateless nation in the world, isolated from Myanmar citizens and given limited territory and resources because of religious tensions between them and the government. However, this abuse didn’t affect the community’s ability to function. The Rohingya were a tight-knit group that depended on each other for survival and they lived peacefully for centuries without any outside influence. However, this all changed in an instant on August 25, 2016, when Myanmar security forces supported by Buddhist militia launched a “clearance operation” that killed at over 1,000 people and forced more than 300,000 to flee their homes. The Guardian says on September 2017 that Refugees have spoken of massacres in villages, where they say soldiers raided and burned their homes, but the government denies this and claims the Rohingya have burned their own homes and killed innocent Buddhists and Hindus of Myanmar. GENEVA on September 2018 say that Myanmar’s claim is false, because not only are there statistics that show the number people have been tortured or killed by the Myanmar army, but there are also videos taken by humanitarian organizations to document the genocide. The New York Times on September 2017 says that the Rohingya crisis is one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world, and the actions of Myanmar is a textbook example of “ethnic cleansing,” which according to Merriam Webster means the expulsion, imprisonment, or killing of an ethnic minority by a dominant majority in order to achieve ethnic homogeneity. This is exactly what is happening in Myanmar, a Buddhist majority country, who wants to eliminate the Rohingya Muslims from their society, and they do so using torture, rape, and mass murder. This torture has lasted over two whole years, but still shows no sign of stopping, because the Myanmar leader Suu Kyi and the rest of the government refuse to acknowledge the abuses of the Rohingya and deny that they are at fault. There have been several cases of ethnic cleansing throughout history. Armenian attacks on the Turkish, Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet Union. Even after centuries, this form of genocide remains one of the most revolting and sickening crimes in this world. One group is able to dehumanize millions of people and defend that crime by claiming they had the pure intentions of maintaining ethnic homogeneity, and that’s why they are not at fault. The story of the Rohingyas show us how some people are lucky enough to practice their culture and religion freely with little to barriers, but others have their entire lives obliterated in front of them because of that.